Century: Ten Times Ten
by Zhang Sizheng
Summary: But you pay a price for love, and falling so fast, so hard, reaching terminal velocity in the darkness and waiting for the dead-pact, the impact that kills… :MinaKushiKaka:
1. Cigarettes and Silver

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**Sizheng**: I was given ten prompts by my fiancée (now wife), **Novocain**, for the purpose of many drabblesprees to come. While she issues the prompts, I assign a pairing to each "decade". There will, hopefully, be ten decades, thus numbering a round hundred of these drabbles, hence "century". There will be different pairings, but most if not all will involve Kakashi (because we both love him to death).

Note that each decade stands as a collection of drabbles-snapshots within the same universe, and that each decade stands independently from each other. They are not linked to one another in any way. That said, please read, and I hope you enjoy them!

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**Century: Ten Times Ten**

An anthology of Naruto snapshots by Zhang Sizheng

_For Novocain_

The First Decade: Cigarettes and Silver

* * *

_1. Cigarette_

* * *

Kakashi lies half-sprawled over Asuma's hard lap, watching smoke curl into fantastical beasts and creatures and whispers of gossamer dreams. There's a strong hand fisted roughly in his hair, and through the tight feeling in his scalp, Kakashi feels reprimanded and loved and just a little suffocated. The smoke tastes acrid on his tongue, but the only complaint he makes is to burrow his face against Asuma's hard belly, his entire body fully aware and humming for the thick bulge against his cheek. Asuma smells of cigarettes, like the smoke does, but it is an unpleasant scent that Kakashi tolerates and loves because it comes from _Asuma_, like the scolding hand and the glowing sparks that die just before falling into Kakashi's ashy hair and _Damnit, Asuma, if you fucking set me on fire, this ass isn't coming anywhere near your stupid dick for the next five years, and I'll tell on you to Kurenai, see if I don't._

* * *

_2. Navy_

* * *

Asuma is a ninja and possesses very little imagination, so he _doesn't _think that Kakashi—masked, mysterious, fearsome Kakashi—is like the night. Because the night looks at the world through features of black-blue-navy-prussian, like Kakashi does, and Kakashi's hair might resemble starlight in the darkness. The night is unkind to any who resists and fights and fears her, and the night, too, is cloaked by mystery and revels in it, but is benign to those who accept and like her for her sake.

But Asuma is a ninja and possesses very little imagination, and the mask irritates him anyhow, so he tells his lover to _take the damn thing off, because it's fucking annoying to eat cotton every time I want to do anything with you_.

And sometimes it's just simpler that way, because Kakashi's stuffed full of metaphors the way a scarecrow is stuffed full of straw and Asuma can make do without tripping himself up with new ones anyhow. Simple is better, Asuma decides, leaving scratches on his lover's stubbly cheek as he claws down the navy mask and takes the laughing mouth in his own.

* * *

_3. Exquisite_

* * *

Exquisite is too dainty a word for Asuma—big, beefy, brawny Asuma, whose eyes and hair are dark like charcoal and snapping like the sparks in a fire. Exquisite is a word for crystals and young girls ripening to the cusp of womanhood and the young lights dew makes when sunlight shafts through it.

But not for Asuma. Never for Asuma.

Except when it _is_, because Asuma possesses a rough charm all of his own and Kakashi cares fiercely for him, and the odd emotion that catches him routinely off guard—a mixture of pain and sweetness and just a little laughter—means that sometimes, just sometimes—

When Asuma's short beard gives Kakashi stubble burn that rubs aggravatingly against his mask, when sweat slicks their bodies and eases their fucking into pleasure and their pleasure into tenderness _oh, yes_, there's no better word for which to describe Asuma than exquisite.

Except when it _doesn't_.

But Kakashi doesn't need words to describe someone he can see right in front of him, someone who has just hooked his thick thumbs into the belt loops at Kakashi's hips and is shuffling backwards, dragging him playfully to the kitchen and…

* * *

_4. Glint_

* * *

The look in Kakashi's eyes is so speculative that Asuma feels heated from just seeing it, and he wonders dizzily how the simple sequence of hanging up a coat and stretching out like a cat and yawning—Kakashi's lips stretch languorously beneath the mask, _Asuma can see it clearly_—shouts a cry for sex the way it just did.

Asuma doesn't know the answer, but he won't need to because he has his whipcord lover knocked flat and wrapped around him and strangling him and _so close _but so far, fuck, Kakashi, lift your bony ass so I can just…

And two sets of arousal-clumsy fingers are tearing at the same buckle and making half as much headway as one steady hand might, but it's off, it's off, and the speculative glint in Kakashi's eye is shut out as he closes it, throws his head back and his legs over Asuma's shoulders to receive him that much more deeply.

Asuma drives into him so harshly Kakashi's head beats on the floor and the eye snaps open again, affronted. Asuma doesn't let him look away, pressing a pattern of bruised communication into Kakashi's hips that will be there for days later. But Asuma doesn't care. And he doesn't think Kakashi does, either, not with that glint that glint holy fuck

_Lookatmelookatmelookatme_

And Kakashi does, and the speculative look is still there, it's there as his mouth parts in mute agony-pleasure-adoration, still beneath the mask, and they've not even kissed yet. Huh.

But it's there, the glint is there and it doesn't fade completely, not even when Kakashi is hobbling about with sex-stupid movements as he hunts for the missing buckle and points out that they _never even made it off the doormat, you horny bugger_.

Asuma laughs.

* * *

_5. Bite_

* * *

Kakashi wakes up because Asuma's kicked him out of his own bed for the third time that evening. The cold of the winter-chilled flooring is a sharp bite against his bare flesh, and Kakashi, staring at the ceiling and peeling his sticky back off the floor, decides that some measure of revenge is in order.

So he climbs back into bed and braces himself against the headboard and his feet against Asuma's shoulders. A powerful shove sends Asuma skidding across the floor and into the wall and Kakashi has never felt so vindicated in hearing a thud-yelp combination before.

And then Asuma crawls back under the covers and tries to steal them and they wrestle for a few short, heated moments, too tired to have sex and yet too cold to simply roll up on opposite ends of the bed. So they writhe about and there are feathers escaping abused cushions because neither really care that pillow fights are only for teenaged girls with bright dreams and clear-skinned smiles who have never killed a person in their lives, the silly, naïve creatures…

And by some unspoken agreement, the blanket-pillow-bed wars are declared a tie and Kakashi finds his face tucked into the corded muscle under Asuma's chin and he half-resents the tender position the way he wouldn't resent a rough hand fisted in his hair, snarls that _if you wanted a fucking girl you have Kurenai, you asshole_. But Kakashi likes the feeling of the stubble peppered lightly across Asuma's throat and he burns what is exposed of his face in rubbing it mindlessly against the short, rough hairs.

* * *

_6. Brush_

* * *

Asuma wakes to find a bloodstained wraith squatting in a sea of newspapers with its features masked by red-splashed porcelain and Asuma's favourite calligraphy brush pen clenched in a white-knuckled hand. Asuma almost wants to tell Kakashi that it's the incorrect grip, but the words are lost in his mouth as Kakashi makes an arrested movement that could have been a stroke, jerking a black arc across the newspapers.

And then Asuma flinches, because the realisation that Kakashi's hands are trembling so much that he can't produce his own name with any degree of legibility is a little frightening, and it means Kakashi is borderline fucked if his body has usurped his iron control over it.

He hates to think he can't help Kakashi, but he knows he can't—those wounds will heal, and the trembling will abate, but Kakashi will _not _forgive Asuma if he doesn't pretend deafness to the low keening and shaking shoulders and…

Lying in bed and pretending he's asleep when his heartbeat is just a little too quick and his breathing a little too ragged, Asuma dreams of another life. He dreams of a life when Kakashi practices his calligraphy after sex, has just crawled out of bed—leaving Asuma in the cold—and taken up the brush (because even if Kakashi isn't a killer or a pathological liar or chronically tardy in that life, there's no question of him being a little screwy in the head, because come on, it's _Kakashi_) and is gracefully scribing characters like _ai _for love and _kokoro _for heart and Asuma might call out to him to _come the fuck back to bed _and not to pretend he wasn't sore or that Asuma hadn't just nailed him _twice _into the bedsheets, the little...

But that's another life, and in _this _life, Kakashi's still hunched in the corner and he'd be so mortified if he was in the state of mind to _realise _Asuma wasn't asleep, and Asuma just has to make do as he does. So he turns on his side, and pretends he can't hear the dry sobs echoing behind the ink-stained porcelain.

Ninja aren't supposed to dream. It hurts.

* * *

_7. Fingertips_

* * *

Kakashi's long, blunt-fingered hands are scarred from playing with his puppies, and summoning his dogs and catching knives. Asuma will catch Kakashi bending his fingers absently into seals, the silvery lines twisting with each subtle movement. It just figures—no twiddling thumbs for the ninjutsu master. Just ox-rabbit-monkey-ox-rabbit-monkey over and over and over again as the air thickens… then Kakashi snaps his beautiful, beautiful fingers and the electric current sparking about him disappears.

His hair is always just a bit wilder afterwards, and Asuma steers clear of him until Kakashi zaps himself on some metal appliance. Then it's safe to laugh, and to touch.

And Asuma touches with a vengeance. Kakashi's fingers—one of the only parts of him not covered up, the damn tease—are clean and free of battle gore and taste like metal and flesh and not a little salty. Asuma sucks them into his mouth and laves at them until the flush glows beyond Kakashi's cheeks and all the way to his pale brows.

* * *

_8. Teeth_

* * *

Kakashi throws back his head and feels Asuma's teeth scrape cleanly over the pulse in his throat and is just _so glad _Asuma likes him, because wouldn't it just suck if he had his throat torn out just like that?

Asuma's teeth are blunt and not dry but not wet, and Kakashi feels Asuma's hot breath on his neck and every hair on his body bristles in anticipation and the chuckle is dark, rumbles through his skin and into his blood and damn if his heartbeat didn't just pick up, and he hopes the bastard doesn't notice—

Kakashi's not swooning. He _isn't_. He only blanks for a moment and he's _right back_ looking into a pair of dark, laughing eyes and the deadpan expression is the last straw.

Kakashi sinks back into the pillows and accidentally elbows Asuma in the face, only because it serves the smug bastard right.

* * *

_9. Blurry_

* * *

Asuma loves Kurenai the way a man like him is supposed to love a woman like her—fiercely, tenderly, softly. A love full of candlelight and lovemaking and firsts, with her dainty hands teasing gently at his face and wreaking havoc with his senses when they walk the dimly lit streets of Konoha, playing at being sweethearts (playing because not all's as it should be; Asuma is fumbling blindly in this game, grasping at its truths and untruths). A love full of kisses and smiles.

But Asuma loves Kakashi the way a man like him should never love a man like _him_—harshly, reminiscently, sweetly. A love full of whispers and low laughs and lasts, with Kakashi's blunt fingers planting blue-green-purple bruises that flower for days (and that Asuma shows off in the privacy of Kakashi's tiny apartment). Sometimes they fuck without kissing, and only Asuma laughs, because Kakashi sometimes has to _remember _to smile with his mouth and voice and not his eyes.

The lines are blurred, and Asuma wishes the world could be inked out in just blacks and whites and a whole lot less silver-greys… if those fuzzy non-lines could just _disappear_, he's sure decisions would be a lot easier to make and to deal with.

Because Kurenai is there and perfect and beautiful and almost as deadly as Kakashi (with her blood-tone eyes and masses of hair that are glossy like the wings of a crow and smell dichotomously of metal and honey) but Kakashi is there, too—has been there since the beginning, no, since_ before _the beginning, since before Asuma…

So it's only right that he cares for Kakashi, and only wrong that he's grateful for Kakashi's understanding that Asuma just can't quite leave, although he wants to so badly. The lines are just so blurred and he's helpless tracing their borders, which fade in and out of one another and it's all so confusing he could howl.

But sometimes, when they're all three of them laughing together, with Kurenai pretending she doesn't know, bless her, and Kakashi drawling something deep and morbid and utterly _hysterical_, and the three of them are laughing together…

Asuma thinks of coarse silver hairs and fragrant black curls tumbling and meshing together against his pillows and the image sprouts a tiny bud of arousal in his groin that unfurls into his chest so that it grasps his heart sweetly and he's gasping, he wishes it could happen, just once, just forever…

He's greedy, he knows he's greedy and selfish, but it feels good. Asuma dreams.

_If only we could all be together…_

* * *

_10. Shards_

* * *

Kakashi is a ninja, and he doesn't have a future.

He only has the present and the yawning chasm of the past and he tries every day to forget he treads the razor edge. But things like this…

Well. He isn't going to shed any tears over the latest death in his life, because wouldn't Asuma be tickled to know that Kakashi cried for him? He wouldn't. He wouldn't give Asuma the satisfaction of knowing that he'd made the Big Bad Copy Ninja bawl like a schoolgirl over a paper-cut, not when the big jerk had gone and done something as inconsiderate as _die_.

He doesn't cry when he receives the missive. He doesn't rage or shout or sob or break the messenger's neck, because it won't bring Asuma back. If it would, he _might just_, but—

Kakashi goes home first and makes for the bed, yanking his mask down and burying his sensitive nose into the cool sheets in desperate search of Asuma's scent. Whywhy_why_ had he washed them that last time? It's stupid, because he feels a little like hitting something, but instead he fills a glass at the tap and takes a sip before sharp, cruel shards are raining down into his hair like tears and he can't even recall when he threw the cup but now it's broken and he just… _fuck_.

The world spins crazily, and that's dangerous, so he clutches at his head for a long moment and goes very, very still.

He doesn't remember falling asleep, but he's suddenly not asleep so he chances a guess that maybe he was. He stumbles off the bed and towards the kitchen and cuts his foot on two shards. They glisten like the tears he won't shed and he slumps against the counter and buries his face in his hands.

He wonders what Kurenai thinks.

But it's hard to care what Kurenai thinks when he's lying on his bed _again _trying to remember the sensation of fingers wound tightly into his hair and pulling on his scalp and the acrid scent of cigarettes that he hated but tolerated because it was from _Asuma_, and…

He gets out of bed _again _and steps on the glass splinters _again _and his blood blossoms beautifully across the floor. He thinks that maybe he'll visit the Memorial Stone and trace Asuma's name until the grooves are worn down and…

Kakashi drifts out the door to grasp at the present and the past and to maybe kill the bastard who killed Asuma. Because—

Asuma was a ninja, and now he's stone cold, dead in the ground, _hahahaha_ the laugh trails off and Kakashi can't stop, can't stop, traces Asuma's name twice—once for himself and once for the ghosts—and then…

Kakashi's been burying his friends and lovers and comrades for so long he doesn't remember how to do it any more—he just _does_.

Kakashi thinks it's because he's a ninja, and he doesn't have a future.

* * *

_End. Snuff the cigarettes, dash the silver…_

* * *


	2. The Wilful, the Wicked and the Wanton

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**Century: Ten Times Ten**

A collection of Naruto snapshots by Zhang Sizheng

_For Novocain_

The Second Decade: the Wilful, the Wicked and the Wanton

* * *

_11. Red_

* * *

Minato has never been particularly fond of the colour red. It's _red_ and _red _is the arterial spray of a misplaced bullet, the life in blood before it is parched to rust, the agony streaking his abdomen when a madman has a knife and just won't _fucking let go_… and these are all sisters of the ultimate reason he despises it.

But he meets his wife, who isn't his wife yet, but he meets her—yes. And she's red too—red like a heart still beating beneath a soft breast, red like the first passionate cry of daybreak streaking the sky, red like… like what might be love, yes, it's love, love so strong he loves her _will you marry me?_

She will. She does. And he likes that, yes, likes having her warm presence by his side in the dim morning-dusk, and fighting over the tiny bathroom sink, or seeing her firebrand hair glinting on an opposing building, her sharp eyes_ which aren't red but the colour of greenleaf the colour of life anyhow_ sighting down the barrel and pulling the trigger and the hostage isn't so much as grazed by the bullet but she snipes the maniac through the shoulder good and proper _yessss_

She's red. She's red, from marvellous head to delicate toe, his wife his lover his… Kushina's red.

And so is the pale Rookie they meet later. They both meet him, Minato and Kushina, and Kakashi's a red boy for all that his hair and skin and eyes are chrome of differing shades—silver hair and grey eyes and pale, pale skin that flares in the darkness when…

But there is the one eye, his left eye, his blind eye… there's a ruddy tint to it. And that relieves Minato because he thought—he's not sure what he thought but it was something to do with _red-red-red-why-aren't-you-red-when-i-think-i-think—_

So he reclines on the bed and watches them, his red lover and his red wife:

Kushina's tongue is red as it darts out, paints Kakashi's lips, which are a bitten red; his eye blinks in surprise, and that's red as well, as is his unsteady flush when he winds his thin hands into her red mane…

The feeling in Minato's gut is heavy, red with love and red with shame.

It's a blood world.

But he finds himself not caring as their hands draw him down. Hers are lacquered blue, he notices, before he is swallowed by their mouths.

* * *

_12. Glow_

* * *

Kakashi smells it.

He's not sure how, but he smells the life growing in Kushina's womb and knows—somehow—that it's not his. And he feels a little frustrated and a little thwarted and not a little foolish as he draws away, dresses himself, ignores the tangle of limbs and bodies sitting up in bed, quilted covers falling from flushed faces and shoulders. He shuffles to the door and twists the knob sharply, slipping out even though _we haven't seen you for two weeks, you brat, get back in here, c'mon_—

The door slides shut on Kushina's confusion and Minato's concern

But Kakashi won't fuck a pregnant woman. He won't fuck the mother of a child when the child's not his—belongs to the man who kissed him good morning at two pm yesterday and yawned his way through dinner but woke up when he saw Kakashi sprawled over—and then… _yes_…

He might let Minato fuck him, _would _let Minato fuck him, but he thinks with resignation that This, whatever This is, has been a long time coming and he should damn well know when to let go.

So he liberates a beer from the fridge and watches the clock tick forty slow minutes. The day has dimmed from afternoon and into velvet twilight before he slips back into the bedroom, leans against the wall. Watches with a half-smile (only a little bitter) as pheromones and sex scents and afterglow tumble over each other and into his senses. And he's not a bystander—in a way, he's participating. And in a way, he wishes he wasn't.

Because she's always vibrant and always a firebrand on his skin. With child, even across the room, twining and twisting with their yellow-haired lover, she is ten times the flame on his skin, and fifty times the heat in his belly. Though that could've been the alcohol, he admits as Minato tongues a lazy trail from the hollow of Kushina's throat, traces her jawline. Nips twice, before she seizes his hair roughly and bruises their mouths and—

Kakashi's gut tightens with longing.

Twice, he moves towards them. Twice, he moves away. (They don't notice.)

He doesn't approach them again.

Presses the cool-perspiring aluminium to his hot brow, licks away the salt collecting on his upper lip and closes his eyes, aching so _hard_ so _lonely_.

And sitting by the wall in the darkening bedroom, he listens to their sleepy murmurs before he closes his eyes, lapsing into a doze. He's not an intruder, he isn't he isn't he isn't. Not here.

_Dreaming_.

* * *

_13. Contrast_

* * *

For all that her hair is bright and red, Kushina is a jackdaw.

She loves beautiful ideas, beautiful objects, beautiful men. Steals them. Hides them. Hoards them.

Her hair stays beneath her cap, so the mark doesn't see her. And because he doesn't, she sights swift and sure and steady, her forefinger on the trigger; two bullets steal his health and his freedom. And she goes home to her two lovers, of whom the world does not know.

She loves her hair, because it is bright and long, because she told her _Mama, I want to grow it out _and it was the first and only request her mother granted her before the laughing man ran her over with his big truck, _oh Mama_.

She loves the law, because it chased the laughing man and he exploded with his big truck in a maelstrom of heat and light and shrapnel (she still bears a scar on her neck). And like the law, she will steal the freedom and health of others like him with her silenced rifle (she keeps that as polished as she dares, because it too must stay hidden) and she loves her beautiful men.

Minato and Kakashi are golden and argent (summer and winter) and both hers—one a secret husband, one a secret love, and both her lovers to be kept close to her heart and _hahaha_ the world will _never_ know.

But _never_ is shorter a length of time than she thinks.

* * *

_14. Feather_

* * *

Falling hurts. The farther you fall, the harder you fall, be you insect or stone or a human toppling from your prideful high pedestal, or a heart tipping from the peace-paved path and down into what some people call love, and what Minato calls _a painful assfuck with an extra side of prostate_.

At least, that's what he most associates with the first time he realises Kakashi is set on staying with them, doesn't mind being chained to a married couple nearly ten years his senior. Wasting his youth and beauty on their tired eyes.

Minato would like to be the soft down from a robin's bosom. He wants to drift on the wind, to fall even more slowly than sakura petals do—slower than three centimetres a heartbeat. He wants to be borne back up to the unbroken path and walk it with his two lovers.

But you pay a price for love, and falling so fast, so hard, reaching terminal velocity in the darkness and waiting for the dead-pact, the impact that kills… well, it's a hurt in the future. An ache that will come in ten seconds or ten thousand or ten million. 

_It doesn't hurt now_, Minato says, bent over the wing of the armchair from which Kushina is holding court. The gleam in her eye speaks of sex and satisfaction and sheer, amused wickedness as Kakashi prods gingerly—apologetically—at the abused ring of muscle and Minato doesn't wince. He is lying.

Kakashi senses it. It's probably why he delivers a stinging slap to Minato's right buttock.

Minato howls.

Kushina howls.

Minato sends little spearpoints of angry emotion in the direction of his cackling wife (she laughs like a crow, or maybe a jackdaw) and cranes his neck. Still, he cannot see anything but Kakashi's chin so he settles for spearing Kakashi's left clavicle with a death stare.

As it lifts in a shrug, the scar bisecting it ripples faintly.

He lies still for all of the next two dozen heartbeats—he counts—before telling Kakashi to let him up. Kakashi presses down lightly—reassuringly—before the pressure lifts and Minato sighs and tries to stand.

He takes two steps before realising that the reason the world is wobbling so much is due to the way his knees refuse to lock. He has time for a resigned _fuck _before he's tumbling towards the ground.

_Idiot_. He's not sure if it's Kushina or Kakashi or himself who says it, but he's suddenly not falling; he's caught and he _knows _it would have hurt if he'd hit the ground.

It's comforting, he thinks as Kushina rolls out of the chair to run a hot bath and Kakashi licks the salt from Minato's jaw, wincing at the stubble stripping his tongue.

He has two lovers to catch him, and to bear him back towards the sun.

* * *

_15. Clink_

* * *

The wind chimes over the kitchen window always irritated Kakashi. But he keeps them there because he'd laughed so very hard when Minato came in from hanging them up with no less than four blood blisters, and… well. If that didn't say sweat and blood and laughter and love, what didn't?

Blood blisters. _Really_.

The breeze rustles a soft melody from them, and Kakashi resists the urge to throw something. He likes silence. Peace. It's just like Minato (and Kushina) to invade his little apartment and hang up noisemakers so that he's never free from noise.

He can't get away from them. He's not sure he wants to, either. Even with Minato looking more and more thoughtful as time goes by—even with the life swelling Kushina's belly—even with…

There's a knock on the door.

Kakashi goes to answer it, because he knows only Kushina makes enough racket through a closed door to drown out a storm of wind chimes in a gale.

He opens the door to let them in, and smiles into their kisses.

* * *

_16. Lipstick_

* * *

She only ever colours her mouth with two shades. She loves the bright red ones, of course, but it's always frustrating when she looks in the mirror to find that her bitten mouth clashes jarringly with her violently shaded hair.

For everyday use, she blocks the pink from her lips with a flesh-shade that shimmers very slightly and throws all attention to her green eyes and red hair so that it's almost as if she is fully featureless beneath the curve of her cheeks.

She's still beautiful, of course—she takes care to be, is vain in a way she hates to admit to.

She only ever applies the second shade when marking someone. It is an obscenely dark purple that borders on mangosteen, and looks almost black against her clear, redhead's complexion.

Today is no exception.

She applies it after priming her gun—two languorous swipes send colour into her bloodless-looking mouth. Blots her lips on the orange handkerchief Minato gave her five years ago, when she cried over her father's death.

And when she sights and places her finger on the trigger, she proceeds to chew away all the purple from her lips. Stains her even, white teeth two shades lighter than a mangosteen's dark shell-skin.

Chews extra-hard, because she can't get a shot in now, with a rash young Rookie breaking and running to apprehend—_you stupid boy, get away Kakashi was never this stupid_

And there's the flash of something bright _Thank God it's sunny out _and she changes her angle—just a little—and the bullet takes off half the blond Rookie's ear and strips several inches of hair and scalp away, but breaks the tendon in the forearm of the mark's knife-wielding left hand. That's all she needs. Choking and scrabbling at the stump of his ear with blood-slicked hands, the Rookie stumbles away from the mark, and that's as clear a shot as she's going to get—

The boy is still sobbing. She can hear it from here.

He's probably traumatised, but she accepts a new handkerchief from Minato and wipes off her bitten mouth and fills it with a colourless sigh. She doesn't forget to kiss Minato, to blot it.

* * *

_17. Bait_

* * *

Many worms writhe out the last of their short, dark lives on a cruel silver barb. Some of them are tugged bloodily to pieces by the jolting of the gluttonous fish's mouth. Minato stares blankly at the pulpy brown-pink-grey annelid—still moving, a little, a little feebly, dirt-tainted blood dripping onto his denim trousers. He'd spent the last five minutes coaxing it onto the end of his hook, and wonders why he chooses to accompany his old mentor fishing now when there're rumours of a nasty ring of dealers preying on secondary school kids. (Minato knows they're not rumours, because he's Superintendent Namikaze and _why_ he was wasting his day off doing something that had nothing to do with his job he didn't know—)

But there's a lesson to be learned here, he thinks, as he gives into a fit of compassion and attempts to free the maimed worm from the hook he'd spitted it on. There's a way to avoid unnecessary bloodshed to net these bastards…

He'd need someone smart and steady, though. Kakashi—

No, not Kakashi, of course. _Not Kakashi_. Kushina would kill him.

Impossibly, the thought makes him grin.

He excuses himself, the idea lighting up the dark thoughts cobwebbing his mind. It puts a spring in his step as he walks away; he doesn't see Old Jiraiya shaking his head and rolling up his line before kicking the now limp deadbait into the water, where it sinks and is probably eaten by some smug bottom feeder.

Or just not eaten at all. What a waste.

* * *

_18. Arch_

* * *

The asphalt tilts to the sky. Kakashi feels the hammer of the bullet miles before the pain closes in on him and sets his world afire.

An explosion in the back of his head. The lights flowering in his vision are the trees and the field and the eye searing klaxon-lights splintered over and over—the rest of the world fades to a black as scarlet as the arterial blood gushing from his chest.

There's no time to scream. To sigh. To say _well, fuck—_

* * *

_19. Shot_

* * *

Too slow. A hole in the fuckface's shoulder, _fuck_, that should've been a hole in his eye, how _dare _he how _dare _he—

Kushina is screaming, screaming without sound or noise or anything, just a constant, thin stream, a voiceless _haaaaaaaaaaa_ that utterly fails to express the chasm that just yawned in her chest as she _rakes _the bastard with bullets two, three, four times over.

He drops. Like a stone. Like a bullet dropped from twelve stories, just before it hits the ground and blows a hole in the pavement. He drops like that.

The wounds they open are little spurts of tomato juice spilling out of a waterlogged juicebox, the dark logo on the dark madman's T-dark shirt darkening further and _serves you right, fucker—_that's not her voice, it's a hoarse, breathless, raging cry for the dead asshole's second death, _and maybe his third and fourth and_

Someone's pulling her back from the ledge, where she'd been ready to leap twelve floors and grow wings from her soul and soar like an eagle while her stupid, slow body plummets deathward. Someone's shouting _what the fuck's wrong with you, Uzumaki_ and she throws away the strangling arms with insane strength and sprints, then stumbles down the emergency staircase and onto the road and into the park where her young lover lies in a blooming, purplish flower that suffuses the grass around him with its sickly red stench.

Kakashi's eyes are closed and she _saw _him fall away from the spurt of blood, all signs point to a grim, grim conclusion _ohgod please let it be looking worse than it is_ _please_ …

She finds the pulse, erratic and spidery beneath her hands. She pinches him, hard.

No response.

None.

_But he's alive he's alive he's alive_

She sets his head in her lap, ignoring all the first aid procedure she's learned since grade school. Wads up her jacket, pressing it tightly against his unresponsive heartbeat, which is strongest where the gunshot—

Where it…

_I slipped_, she says in response as her partner, some two hundred feet away, rolls the mark's body over and stares accusingly at her. _I was surprised and forgot to take my finger off the trigger_.

_Bullshit_, he says.

_Yeah_, she says. _Whatever_, she says. _Get a fucking ambulance for Hatake here or you'll fucking be next_ _—_

_Crazy bitch_ _—_

She might be arrested for manslaughter. Her own teammates might take her away.

That's fine. With the blood Kakashi's losing right now… she doesn't think she wants to be around when her partner reports to Minato.

She presses her hand into the bullet wound. If she presses hard enough, it might take in her finger. She could touch Kakashi's heart.

She chooses instead to rest her yarn-red head against his red-spattered one.

_I just… slipped. _

* * *

_20. Play_

* * *

They're moving slowly through life now. So slowly, in fact, that it feels someone's hit _pause_ and they've been frozen since Kakashi got hit and almost died—could still die, really.

But they visit weekly still because it takes time to wake up from any deep sleep. For one girl, it took a hundred years and violation and the plaintive cries of the newborn she carried to term while dreaming. But Kakashi's not a foolish girl pricked by a spindle; he's a man with a hole through his heart, growing older and frailer as the colour pales from his colourless skin _wake up please kisses don't work come back_ _because_

They have a son (his name is Naruto). When he's two months old, they bring him to see the man who'd been there and… wasn't, not anymore. And Naruto frets and sobs, but Kakashi doesn't wake (but it's not like he's a woman and he's only been asleep five months, not a century of thorns and swords).

They're still waiting for someone (they'd wait a hundred years, if they could) to press play. And sometimes, in their brighter moments… well, they think it'll be Kakashi who does it.

Granted, they don't think much, anymore. They just hope.

It's all they have left. That and a basket full of memories, quicksilver moments slipping through wicker fingers.

_Come back. Please._

* * *

_End. Broken will, wicked tears, wanton fury. _

* * *


End file.
